-Do you still have your Grime ring?
GRIME: Yeah, man.
What do you think?
That's 10 years old now.
I made that ring 10 years ago.
There it is.
-Yes.
GRIME: You said this was going to take three hours, you guys
here eating up my Sunday.
-Yes.
GRIME: Hurry the fuck up.
-You're more than welcome to go and do some stuff.
Bet it would be very interesting to see you go to
the post office.
GRIME: Fuck you.
-Do you have to go to the post office?
GRIME: No, fuck you.
-Why?
It's just like your every day.
Anyone can go see you
tattooing or sitting somewhere.
GRIME: They can?
-Yeah.
GRIME: That sounds horrifically banal.
-All right.
GRIME: All right.
Oh fuck, I don't know.
Now, you didn't tell me you wanted to look
at a bunch of shit.
Fuck, I don't know.
There's a box laying here.
It's been sitting here for months with blood all over it.
Some of it's tracing, some of it's drawings.
I guess some of these are tracings.
Maybe there's not a lot of drawings in
here, I don't know.
GRIME: Oh, should I throw them away?
I'll fucking sell them to people like you later.
-We could just do a basic sit down now and then we'll go
rifling through everything.
GRIME: Is that what you think is going to happen?
-Uh huh.
In my mind, that's how it's going to play out.
GRIME: What kind of rifling do you intend to do?
Who are these viewers?
-This'll probably get at least a million views.
GRIME: All right.
I've got a garage that fits your desires.
-Really?
In here?
GRIME: Yeah, in here.
All right, are you going to follow me then?
-Lead on.
GRIME: I don't know how much of my personal life you need
to have in this thing.
Come on, mister fucking I like to dig through shit.
Oh, there's a lot of shit in here.
Oh, you'll want this one.
You got to see this board.
This board's awesome.
Here we go, here we go-- this is the gem right here.
Yeah, this is Mark Gonzales's personal board from back in
the day.
-From?
GRIME: Yeah, this is his board from when he was a kid.
This thing's sick though, right?
I bought that shit through the internets.
I bought it fucking cheap.
But, yeah, Mark Gonzales's personal board.
This thing's so sick.
I got this for like maybe $200.
It's so stupid to think it's so cool.
I don't know why people didn't want it.
They wanted original boards that were unskated.
I don't see how they lost out on how cool that is, you know?
HENRY LEWIS: And you see his board collection.
I mean, if you look at that and you mix that with modern
tattooing and illustration work, I think that's where it
all stems from.
Like, his style and his color schemes in tattooing.
Like, for example, that biomechanical sleeve.
It has neon pink coming off of it.
And then the majority of color that was kind of like a weird
looking baby blue, that crept into this little organic dark
umber green, going into olive sappy green.
I think it's based from old school
'80s skateboard graphics.
And all that whole skater culture back then when he was
in love with that stuff.
You can tell that's where he came from.
GRIME: How about that?
-It's nice.
GRIME: This thing's fucking sick.
How about this thing?
This thing's a fucking gem.
I love this board.
This board's the shit.
Now, this one has such a good theme.
-I've never even seen it.
GRIME: How about this thing?
Don't touch that.
You can't touch this board.
-I've never seen this color.
GRIME: Yeah, that's because they made like three of them.
I know for sure there's two of these that exist--
two.
But I don't know if there's more.
I got it from the guys who screened it.
They were trying out some new primer and
then the black coat.
And the coat, like they sprayed a bunch of boards and
then they came back the next morning I think and then they
all reacted.
And they were like fuck it, we'll print them anyway and
they printed them anyway.
This board's awesome.
GRIME: No, it's not a Chris Cole graphic, dude.
It's a Rodney Mullen graphic.
When'd you start skating?
Fucking '89?
-Did you have all these boards when you were younger?
GRIME: No, I had some of them but I didn't have all of
them-- no, of course.
I grew up in Grand Junction, Colorado.
-What was your town like?
GRIME: Shit.
-High school was--
GRIME: Shit.
-It was shitty?
GRIME: Stupid.
-What were you into?
GRIME: Skateboarding and punk rock.
Skateboarding and punk rock.
-Were you always "The Grime?"
GRIME: Yeah.
-Is that a nickname?
GRIME: Yeah.
-Like, when you went to college did you introduce
yourself as "Grime?"
GRIME: No, no, no.
I used it for my creative life, my artistic life.
I started doing graffiti when I was really young.
I was painting my name.
I know that I had a tag running in Junction that had
my name and next to it I wrote 1984.
So I had tags running on a bridge from '84.
And I don't even know why I did that, really.
I mean, I know it's like a thing-- you
people do that shit.
But it wasn't like a one-time thing, it was a thing that I
kind of enjoyed in a weird way or wanted to do.
I think I enjoyed being creative, if you will.
But I didn't see a line where to pull that creativity.
Or how to use it, or that it was a viable thing outside--
that it could be an occupation.
It never occurred to me that I could be an artist as an
occupation, I don't think, for a long time.
When I was 19, I moved to Arizona to go to school, get
out of my town.
I'd been there a few times, and you could
skateboard a lot there.
There was good skateboarding there, and there was a lot of
year-round skateboarding because of the weather.
And I figured OK, fuck it, I'll go there.
But also because I had been there.
It was familiar, so it felt easier than like oh, maybe I
should go to San Francisco.
I've never been there, I should go.
That would have felt a little too crazy.
So I went there.
And then after a while I thought oh, I got
to get out of here.
I had a desire to make tattoos since I was, I don't know,
like maybe 15?
And I remember it surfacing again maybe when I was 19 to
20 years old.
It surfaced again, and I thought I'm going to do it,
I'm going to do it.
When I had no idea how to do it.
It was almost as hard as figuring out how
to get to the moon.
Oh, God, there's going to be some gems in here.
This is some early shit right here.
Oh shit, graffitis.
This is like '90--
oh God, I don't even know what.
God, this stuff is terrible.
This stuff is just terrible.
Oh shit, first portrait I ever did.
-What?
You mean Arizona?
GRIME: Yep.
I didn't get very many tattoos at first because I
didn't have any money.
And I knew the kind of work I wanted to get and I
couldn't afford it.
So I waited until I got some money and I got
tattoos that I wanted.
I got tattooed by Marcus and Guy Aitchison and Eddie
Deutsche and Aaron Cain.
Those are the people I was getting tattooed by early.
Yeah, I got tattooed by Marcus in '93.
I came to SF-- it was maybe the second time I'd been to
San Francisco.
Marcus Pacheco was a huge influence on me.
And he was one of the reasons I wanted to start tattooing
anyway, seeing all of his work in tatt mags.
-Marcus Pacheco owned Primal Urge.
GRIME: He owned Primal Urge, yeah.
Yeah, he did.
-And that was what?
GRIME: It was a tattoo shop, actually.
They made tattoos there back in the day.
It was in San Francisco, California.
-Known for traditional sailor tattoos?
GRIME: Yep.
No, they weren't known for fucking--
oh, shit the bed.
They were not known for sailor tatts.
They were known for very progressive
tattooing at the time.
Very, very progressive tattooing.
They were doing stuff that really hadn't
been tried in tattooing.
If it had been, only in really small increments and in a kind
of unheralded way, if you will.
CHRIS O'DONNELL: For sure, it was like a very exciting time
period for San Francisco.
It seemed like a new phase was about to explode.
I had a stack of magazines back in the early '90s just
filled with so much garbage.
So much awful work, but there was some good stuff, too.
And I figured, obviously, I'll just take all the good stuff
out, put it all in a book.
So yeah, Marcus was doing all these really interesting
tattoos, very painterly.
Just very unique for the time.
He was really pioneering that sort of idea that you could do
more with it than just outline and shade and just things that
nobody else was doing.
Just very complicated work--
very painterly.
I definitely responded to that really early
on, and so did Grime.
GRIME: For me it was so attractive and creative.
And his stuff was also technically always super solid
and super perfect, basically.
That it was a big draw when you saw something that was
executed so well, it's just really attractive.
My eyes really liked it.
I was really drawn towards it.
Marcus is the man.
He taught me a ton of things.
I definitely wouldn't be the tattooer I am if
it wasn't for Marcus--
like, 100%.
Well, we worked together a few different times.
CHRIS O'DONNELL: In my mind, his life started when he moved
to San Francisco to work at Primal Urge.
I can remember him being kind of quiet back then, actually.
I didn't get a real sense of his personality
when I first met him.
I think he was just really involved in getting set up in
San Francisco.
GRIME: I was just focused on learning how to tattoo.
There was no time to express myself.
I was too busy studying tattooing.
I was just drawing and looking at stuff and
thinking about tattooing.
LANGO OLIVEIRA: I know he was learning a lot from Marcus.
And Marcus was like the biggest influence on my work
and at the time like the biggest idol
and all this stuff.
So I really want to get a tattoo actually from Marcus.
I tried kind of hard, but it would never happen.
So I needed to get tattooed.
So it was like fuck it, if this guy doesn't tattoo me
I'll just get it from this guy Grime because he
looks pretty good.
This is supposed to be like a zombie chick or whatever.
I was like 20 years old or something.
On this one I didn't say anything.
I was like, dude, just draw me something sick.
I don't fucking know.
CHRIS O'DONNELL: His style of tattooing was way more
exaggerated than it is now.
I mean, every detail you could put into a tattoo, he was
doing more than that.
GRIME: I don't think I suffered for too long in the
beginning of tattooing.
I think I did pretty well with the technical side, but it
then takes forever to get a vision.
CHRIS O'DONNELL: He was just trying everything.
Grime had a huge buzz.
His work was immediately so unique that everybody
immediately noticed.
And that was back in the day when if you had a magazine
article in "International Tattoo Art," or whatever, it
would get you noticed in the industry.
Now there's so many magazines and no one notices if you have
an article anymore.
But back then, that was a big deal.
And that kind of solidified his status in the San
Francisco scene.
GRIME: Oh look, that was in a magazine.
Look, it's so flashy.
-So at the time what'd you think when you
finished that tattoo?
GRIME: I was psyched.
So were a lot of other people.
All right, I think we're done.
I don't think there's anything extra special in here.
I don't know what else is down here, dude.
I don't have anything.
Look at me, I can't even go out.
I got you guys fucking keeping me in.
-We're going to go get ice cream.
GRIME: We're good?
-Yeah, we're good in here.
GRIME: You done?
-No, we're not done.
GRIME: Make you happy?
-We are not done.
GRIME: That make you happy?
-I'm almost happy.
A little bit.